Say what? Peeing on your compost? Yes, you read it right. It might seem like a slightly unorthodox gardening practice but it could be your own personal contribution to the green cause because compost can be greatly improved by the addition of human urine. Gardeners always want to improve their compost and their garden soil right? Yes!
If you pee on your compost, it has a double environmental whammy. It speeds up its decomposition so you can get it on the garden more quickly, and it also saves water because you don’t have to be flushing nearly as much. Urine contains potash and nitrogen, and these make it a rich fertilizer. It has an NPK ratio of about 11-1-2. And to add to its richness, urine contains urea, which helps to speed chemical reactions involved in breaking down organic material. So, for the health of your garden you may want to pee on your compost heaps. Don’t flush a free, naturally-created nitrogen product down the toilet.
For straw bale gardening urine is a wonderful conditioner because of the nitrogen. It helps the bales start to break down in the weeks before planting, it is free, and it much more natural than the commercial nitrogen products. We have used straw bales and urine on our own homestead with great success.
If you are concerned with hormonal or pharma byproducts in your urine you don’t have to be. Compost gets hot enough ideally to burn off anything potentially harmful. I recommend the book Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants to find out more about this practice. You also can’t use all your pee on the compost because this would make it entirely too wet and a balance has to be achieved. If you plan to add urine directly to active garden beds or container plants you will also want to dilute it.
All us green folks want to recycle right? Well, look into pee-cycling too for a better garden.
